The presence of closely-spaced and/or non-uniformly spaced words in captured images may detrimentally affect the reliability of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques applied to the images. In many OCR approaches, text is recognized in an image by localizing each word and/or character in the image, which is followed by classification and recognition of the word and/or character. When multiple words are printed close to each other, and/or the words are non-uniformly spaced conventional OCR techniques may produce an increased number of errors because characters or character sequences that make up words may be incorrectly clustered. Consequently, an increased error rate may result in the output of the OCR process.
Therefore, there is a need for systems, apparatus and methods that facilitate robust and accurate recovery of closely-spaced and/or non-uniformly spaced words and/or characters reliably.